This is our final post of the year, before 2025 fades like breath on a cold window-pane. It's almost exactly twelve months since we announced Travelling At Night, and we've come a hell of a long way. But there are miles to go before we sleep, so here's a preview of what you can expect from Travelling in 2026.
First up: Travelling's first ever trailer! Featuring places you haven't been yet, like amber-cloaked Mahaggony, and things that already live inside you, like a powerful desire to explore weird 1948 Europe, and definitely not worms. We'll have more trailers down the line - stay tuned.
Music announce! We can finally reveal that the totally brilliant J. Willgoose, Esq. from Public Service Broadcasting is composing Travelling's soundtrack. AK and I are both big fans of PSB and the gods suggested we were on the right track when art freelancer Adrien independently found inspiration for Caen in the same photo as PSB used on the cover of their War Room EP.
We thought a game set in post-war Europe would work brilliantly with PSB's period-centric instrumental music, which is frequently inherently hopeful about the world. 'Hope' is a major keyword for Travelling, after all. If you've never listened to them (!) and would like to remedy that situation, their best-known song is probably 'Go!', but we might also humbly suggest 'Spitfire', 'Gagarin', 'The Pit' or 'Blue Heaven' to start you off. (NB: Travelling's soundtrack will not have speaking samples, of course, because that would conflict with reading AK's text. But the vibes are very much the same.)
Long-time freelancer Adrien (who drew a lot of BOOK OF HOURS) has been hard at work all year, and will return again next year to further materialise Travelling's Europe. The header of this blog post, for example, is from his WIP Berlin environment, while a personal favourite of mine is his Mimata scene, which (when animated) will feature a frankly upsetting number of birds in those forest trees.
We'll also be working on a lot of animations next year, to bring Adrien's and my still art to life. That means new outfits for Spencer, improved run/walk cycles, NPC animations and as many environmental grace notes as we can possibly fit in. We've been working with an excellent animation studio called Nuclear Starfish: take a look at their great Strathcoyne and Annabel idle! Marvel at Vincent's shiny, shiny goggles!
Look, I know not *everybody* is as excited about UI as I sometimes am, but this is a bit of Weather Factory bête noire so we are determined to conquer it. Cue new 'exhibits' (a focus pane during dialogue where we can show any relevant items / discussion topics that aren't already in the scene), a mega pause menu and more.
We're aiming to release some sort of publicly playable build of Travelling At Night next year. Depending on progress, life, the breath of the gods etc this might be a bigger slice of the game that we open up to the public as testers, or even a relatively polished first Steam demo - where people who do not read this blog can pick it up, and AK and I will await their judgements from behind the back of the sofa. The key thing is that the alpha has already caused AK to spend half a day writing about a cat on a piano, so things are looking up for our chances of a BAFTA.
We've just released this year's final episode: 'Snow in the Neath'. We talk about alpha, the sine wave of game dev, where Fallen London's Overgoat came from and how we're attempting to solve the 'layer of plastic' in AAA RPGs. Listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or a load of other places if you prefer.
MACWU will continue into 2026 until either we get overwhelmed with actual work on the actual game or run out of interesting things to say. Impossible though that might seem...
All that's left for us to do is wish you an extremely merry Christmas and a wonderful new year. Thank you to all who've already helped with some early feedback on Travelling, and thank you simply for being along with us for the ride! Here's a tragically unused early variant of our WORMS trailer, to see you into 2026 ~~